Songfacts®:

• Frontman Chino Moreno discussed this lament about spiritual isolation with Artist Direct. Said Moreno: "I love that one; it jumps around a lot. I was going to fix it so every verse told one cohesive story, but I decided that I really like it the way it is. It's really fragmented. Pieces of information are in different places—under the water and in the city. It's broad, and it feels really good. It adapts to the overall vibe. It has a night time feel to it as well. We've been playing it in rehearsal and I realized how much I like it now. When I first wrote it, I thought, 'You could tell this is one of my songs. It's probably the most Team Sleep-esque song on the record.' I didn't want it to be too self-indulgent right off the bat or for people to think, 'This is Chino just being Chino.' Really it's not; everybody contributes on that song fairly equally. I wrote the opening riff, but the song grew from everybody building on to that. It's more of a Deftones song than people might believe it is. Playing the song in rehearsal, it sounds mighty. For the simple fact that it doesn't have any crush guitar, screaming or anything aggressive on it, 'Sextape' sounds really big."
• In a 2025 interview with The Guardian, Chino Moreno said he couldn't recall the exact process of writing the lyrics for "Sextape." He explained that much of the band's writing leans into abstraction, aiming to "paint a picture of a feeling" rather than tell a literal story. For this track, the music itself provided the spark.
  
  "There's three notes that go through the whole of 'Sextape,' and they're very lush and beautiful they take that side of us to the extreme," he said. "There's beauty there, in the sonics of it. Lyrically, I just ran with that emotion."